The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The World Wide Web has experienced explosive growth from its humble beginnings as a single web site in August 1991. Within 4 years from that date, the Web had grown to over 100,000 web sites. And growth continued at a breakneck speed. Today, in 2008, there are more than 100,000,000 web sites in the World Wide Web.
As the number of web sites has increased, so has their complexity. In the early 1990s, web sites consisted mainly of static HTML pages and images. Then, in 1995, Sun and Netscape announced “LiveScript”, now known as Javascript, which allowed programmers to add scripting capabilities to web sites. This was quickly followed by the addition of plugins, scripting for plugins, VBScript, DHTML, Java, ActiveX controls, AJAX, Flash and other technologies that allowed increased interactivity between users and web browsers and between web browsers and web servers.
Today, in 2008, there are a variety of different web browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari and others) that have varying support for different technologies on many different operating systems (Windows, Linux, OS X and others). Creating and supporting a web site that operates correctly between all of them has become a complicated matter.
As the Web has grown, so have the number of businesses that depend on the Web to do business. Amazon, a company that sells products entirely off the World Wide Web, was founded in 1994 just 3 years after the debut of the first web site. In 2007, only 13 years later, Amazon's revenue was over 14 billion dollars from Internet sales.
Countless other businesses have been started to make money using the World Wide Web. Some make money selling products, while others sell services or make money via advertising. In all cases, these businesses need to ensure their web sites stay up, perform well and don't have errors that would cause users to become frustrated or unable to use their service.
As the need to ensure that web sites perform well has grown over time, companies have formed to develop and sell products and services that aid individuals to monitor the performance and availability of web sites and debug problems associated with them. Some of these companies sell their tools as a software product that users can run on their own machines. Other companies sell hardware products and still others sell services that help individuals monitor web sites over time.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.